Google+ houses healthy community for photographers

The accepted story on the Internet is that Google+ is a ghost town, that Google squandered initial interest in the service by not letting people in quickly enough, and that it’s dead in the water.

Yet, standing in proud defiance of that narrative is a plethora of photographers, who’ve flocked to Google+ and somehow transformed it into one of the most vibrant photographic communities in recent years.

The gradual exodus of users from Flickr saw many photographers transition to other services: 500px picked up a lot of the slack, and the ubiquity of Facebook made it a natural home for pro photographers peddling their wares. But when Google+ first went live in July of 2011, a core of photographers joined in the first rush, and brought with them enough followers to create a self-sustaining critical mass of users.

The iPad version of Google+ allows for seamless scrolling through users profiles (image by Thomas Hawk).

Thomas Hawk is one of the most followed photographers on Google+, and he thinks that Google actively went after the photography community.

“Many of the earliest G+ photographers were amongst the most social and active but neglected photographers on Flickr,” Hawk said. “Google+ successfully courted the most social photographers on the web and made a big push towards welcoming these people into the Google+ ranks from day one.”

And though Google exec Marissa Mayer's arrival as Yahoo!'s CEO a couple months ago looked promising for Flickr, the site's first homepage redesign since her arrival, now slowly being rolled out, reportedly removes the Flickr link from its former prominent left nav position, according to Business Insider.

Google+, however, is keeping photographers at the forefront. Google’s Brian Rose pointed out that, “everyone on our team is a photog, whether we shoot with our mobiles or with film,” and that his team constantly monitors feedback on the service, be it through product forums, Google+ mentions or feedback links.

Features for photographers

Unsurprisingly, it was image quality that drew many people into Google+ originally. When the service debuted, images uploaded to Facebook were brutally compressed, leaving them heavily artifacted. While Facebook has improved on that now, since inception Google+ stored photos as large, gorgeous images inside a sleek UI that blew everything Facebook and Flickr were offering out of the water.

Even at thumbnail scale, Google+ displays images in an arresting and interesting way (images by Thomas Hawk).

Anyone you talk to who was there in the early days agrees that it was the way that photographs looked on Google+ that clinched their initial buy-in. HDR guru Trey Ratcliff put it simply: “photographers spend a lot of time inside Google+ because of the user-experience of sharing photos. Not only do they look great in the stream, but the lightbox also makes the photos look cool.”

Pulling up an entire album on the iPad shows you the images, and at a glance displays how many comments and +1s they've received (images by Brian Rose).

He’s not alone. Prolific photographer, author and organizer of the Google+ Photographer’s Conference Scott Kelby saw the effect as soon as he joined. “The size of the thumbnails were the size of [every other website’s] big photos … seeing the photos large had a huge impact on me the first time I launched Google+.” Hawk describes the photos on Google+ as “huge oversized images compared to Facebook's postage-stamp-sized images at the time.”

Comments

I think Google+ & Picasa have deficiencies which have not been addressed yet.

They ignore a lot of the EXIF data - in particular the Image Title and Copyright field. Tags only seem to appear in Picasa Web and not in Google+

Kudos to Facebook which actually extracts the embedded copyright statement and displays it.

Google+ and Picasa Web don't honor the formatting of the Description field - jumbling it all up into a big mess, and they ignore any embedded html in the description. Flickr bless it's little cotton socks sucks the image title, description and tags right out of the picture for display - and it keeps selected embedded html too.

Google's commitment to photography is not there yet, otherwise Picasa (and Google Chrome) would know what a color profile is and be able to honor it.

My conclusion is that the Google+ interface looks good, but is lacking in substance.

I guess the need of photographers can be summed up easily by listing all the things Flickr doesn't offer: What we need is a simple and quick reacting UI with a dark background and large images in proper quality.

I love it there. I assure you all it is 100% not dead or a ghost town. There is however a learning curve to getting it setup so you're following "photographers"I currently have over 10K people following me with tons of interaction. I visit daily and truly enjoy it like no other network. We have a Facebook presence too but it's just not the same. Plus with all the new "promote to play" functionality from the FB pages, a lot of people I know are giving G+ a second look.

Feel free to stop by if you'd like help building up your circles with great photographers.http://gplus.to/mbstuart

There's plenty of room for both social networks, but I'd think again about dismissing Google+

Google+ is pretty dead, that´s for sure.Now that facebook once again changed their policies in restricting the posting coverage of both simple users AND sites, forcing them to pay in the future, let´s see how google+ will develop - it´s by far a better network (usability).

A long long time ago I was joining Googles' Orkut. It never succeeded mainly due to the invite only policy, But I think Orkut was more like a test for Google in which way to go by means of social media. Google never gave me the feeling till Google+ that it saw a social media network like Orkut as an important product...now they are too late.

Google with Google+ at least tries not to give the impression to be a commercial network with a social touch. I like the whole circle idea, it's much much lesser cluttered and much more logical and easier to maintain than that Face(facial)book, especially the privacy and sharing settings.

The only reason I use Facebook more is due to that most of my family/friends/colleagues use facebook - that is in my opinion the only power of facebook it has the enormous user base - and that is the key component of any social network, not only for your users but also for your stockholders. :-)

Strange article. Who is on Google+ among enthusiasts and pros here in DPR? None of my friends who are into photography are on Google+ and since Facebook upgraded its photo capabilities that now allows high-def viewing/sharing of images, FB definitely beats Google+ hands down. How much did Google pay for this article?

Agree. I don´t see a reason for using Google+. Google is trying to force people to use it, not only people with "normal" Google account but also Youtube users.They want to compete with Facebook, but I really doubt the success.

The same can be said of Google Richard. If you asked me to name my top ten untrustworthy companies, Google would be top. I would only ever use their services with fictional data, making it a no-go zone for social interraction.

I can't find images on google+ ? Help!I googled "google plus" -> https://plus.google.com/I ended up on a page that looked similar to my facebook page. On there I tried every Icon and search field to find this "thriving community of photographers". Zip. Where can I find great pictures? Which web address to use, where to click? I am a little bewildered that this article complaints about the www.flickr.com interface. Yet within seconds I could find galleries of my interest and explore them. I spent an hour flat to find any galleries on google + and found nothing. I am also confused that this Articles is intended to introduce google+ to photographers who do not know google+. Now after trying to use this service I am more confused. Is google + more like facebook to be a posting wall with community linking? After reading the Article and comments I thought this is more like flickr but with a better presentation and with having better community tools as bonus. What am I missing ? Help!

Articles like these are written like some tourist went to China for 2 weeks and writes about China after reading a bit, travelling a bit.

1. GooglePlus is a social network not completely like Facebook and not completely like Twitter. There may be similarities and there are big differences.

2. GooglePlus is NOT a one topic forum (i.e. photography), is not a photo gallery (i.e. not Flickr, not Smugmug). It does have a social community like Facebook, it does have Hangouts (so you can talk video and audio amongst your peers and with some celebs). We use GooglePlus to show photos and talk about taking photos, talk about how we feel, talk about food, hobbies. We use Google Plus globally to be in touch internationally with people we have never met before and we use Google Plus locally to first figure out whether so and so is our type of person before we meet. Once we meet in person, we then use Google Plus to further discuss things and show photos throughout the day, night.

What is the best way to upload collections from Lightroom to Google+ ? Is it Jeffrey Friedl's Picasa Plugin:http://regex.info/blog/lightroom-goodies/picasaweb ?

I liked the content very much, congratulations. However, I found the style uncomfortable. It left me with the feelings such as you copied and pasted it from a google+ marketing brochure suggesting it lacks a neutral view on the topic.

Dear New_Pants:Thanks for your link. I had not found this one before, so great you mentioned it here. This plugin works via export and thus could be more straight forward than Jeffrey's Picasa Plugin, which works through publishing. However -- I think -- I will prefer the method through publishing as I plan to set up smart collections and plan for my collections to dynamically change with each shooting and I like for the web service which hosts my pictures to automatically reflect these changes which the publishing method appears to deliver. Have you tried both ? Is there a reason you prefer "New Products" over "Jeffrey Friedl's" Plugin ? As for me I have not used any Lightroom plugin yet. I only published manually to flickr once but am not happy with it. I have several collections ready for publishing in Lightroom and I am researching the best way to do as well as the best service to pick. E.g. 500px would be no good, as I can't automatically upload all my collections.

To answer your question "Is there a reason you prefer "New Products""... quite simply I wrote that plug-in(!), so it primarily satisfies how I work with Lightroom.

I like Google+ and wanted a really easy and quick way to share photos with it and Picasa Web. Please feel free to get in touch via that website if you want to discuss Lightroom Publishing with that plug-in. Otherwise I wish you good luck using whatever Lightroom option does the job best for you!

Dear New_Pants: Thanks. I am interested in your plugin and if you answer my question here you might interest a larger audience and at a same time more people learn how to publish to google + via Lightroom. I hope this is Win Win for all.1) What are the advantages of sharing photos through export rather than publishing ?2) What workflow are you suggesting in Lightroom towards publishing to Picasa with your plugin3) Could you help me to understand Picasa and Google+? After reading the Article here I was expecting a flickr but with better GUI and community tools on steroids. However, I could not find it. Please see my post above. An answer would be very appreciated. Thank you.

I can give you some quick answers:1) Exporting removes the step of maintaining Lightroom collections. You would simply select the photos (which optionally could be in a collection) and then simply Export them to a new or existing album in Picasa Web. Publishing requires you setup Lightroom collections and then Publish those to the Web. Using Export removes the need to maintain collections, but may not be suitable to everyone's workflow.2) I typically work on an album at a time in Lightroom. When I've tidied up the photos from my recent trip or vacation I export them to Picasa Web. I rarely modify that album in Picasa Web once it has been created.3) I think this article does the best job for giving an overview of Google+. Picasa Web is simply the online photo storage site where Google+ gets and stores its photos.

Dear New_Pants: Thanks for your answers!1) & 2) Makes perfect sense. It is in fact how I work currently. I was planning to start using collections but I am not doing so yet. Your plugin seems to be a shortcut to get started right away. I will try it. Thanks so much!3) I eventually found the "Home Page" of a photographer on Google Plus:https://plus.google.com/+ColbyBrown/photosI like what I see and agree this is much better presentation than the photographer's home page on flickr. Yet one question remains: On flickr, pbase & 500px I can explore photos without knowing the photographers name / link to his home page. I also enjoy things like featured photo's, featured albums, editors pick, etc. Where can I find such things on google+ ?

A quick follow up to this conversation.http://www.newpproducts.com/?page_id=2743The plug-in at the above link now does both Lightroom Export and Publish uploading to Picasa Web. So you can choose whether you want the simplicity of Lightroom's Export feature, or the trackability of Lightroom's Publish Services feature.

I prefer Skydrive and Microsoft Photo Gallery. Used to be a Picasa/Picasaweb users but the editing tools sucks compared to Photo Gallery. Skydrive has integrated photo/doc design, Facebook/Twitter sharing suppot and as early adapter I got 25GB for free ;-)

I like G+ but hate the fact that concerns from us small, unimportant people, are seldom, if ever addressed. This is especially annoying when a very important feature like the ability to add an entire circle to your "G+ page doesn't work.

So, when your friends brag and tell you that they have x followers and you don't makes you kind of jealous (it shouldn't, but yes it does because it limits your ability to receive #1's and comments) and you eventually want to quit.

For example... I am nowhere close to the limit of circles or people in them. But, when I am included into a circle and want to include it in my G+, I am ALWAYS prohibited with the the message saying that I can't because I have reached my daily limit - try again tomorrow! Well, after NEVER being able to add a circle, I say forget it! Forget about customer service... there isn't any, or at least they have never bothered to try to work out this and some other problems.

I was unimportant in the beginning, and as far as the photography community before G+ I was nobody. Twitter is this same way though - no one will just follow you because you name sounds neat. You have to get out there and interact.The circle limits are very annoying at times for sure.

Picasa was good and Google+ made it even better, in particular album preview layout. As not very online socially active (I got real life), I don't like Google pushing "circles" and still invite people via email notification - I'm obsolete, I know....But - slideshow, size and maintaining quality are on the plus side.

I've used Picasa for years and, of course, G+. I post only png images to FB now and it still just gets me close to the G+ quality using jpg uploads. For best resolution, I display on my own website which is far better than both of the others.

FB still has the audience so, though I don't like the FB quality as much, I still post to FB as my initial source to bring people to my website - which I track, of course, using Google Analytics. :)

I may have to revisit my neglected G+ account, but only to participate as a photographer. When it comes to sharing photos with friends and family, all of them are on Facebook. Unfortunately Facebook is absolutely horrid when it comes to photography. Yes they finally got around to allowing higher resolutions with less compression, but Facebook albums are clunky to manage.

I have had an almost entirely neglected Flickr account since Flickr first started. I have always found Flickr to be a frustrating site to navigate. The social aspects of it were appealing, but as a photo sharing site it always seemed lacking to me.

i agree with you about fb...lousy ui, but i guess resolution has gotten better. i'm using smugmug now which i like, but the interface to fb isn't great as it doesn't seem that most of my friends see the post on my wall..as opposed to my loading the album myself directly onto fb.

Richard, I also use Smugmug. That is my main photo sharing site. I used to post from Smugmug to Facebook, but found that it was time-consuming. Also there is some value to having FB albums that friends can browse (because chances are they will do that more often than they will browse your Smugmug site). I have found that Lightroom makes it easy for me to publish a subset of Smugmug photos to FB very easily. Totally redundant, but I only post about 25% of my Smugmug photos to FB.

I have been active in quite a number of different photographer online communities. They all have their advantages and are great. Some became very large and are excellent. But the major limitation that they all come with is the very thing that makes them popular: they are for photographers, not for the average person. Those communities are full of other photographers. Becoming popular among other photographers is great for your ego but generates very little public exposure (with a few rock star exceptions). From a marketing point of view that's not helpful. So when I read that G+ is very popular among photographers but kind of a desert when it comes to the average person I'm not too excited about it.

I'm not saying have a photographer heavy community is in any way bad. It can be very helpful and full of useful info for photographers, but in terms of getting your name out there that's not working based on my experience. But then, G+ has the chance to become a general social media hit.

Dare I say it: quite a catalogue of misconceptions here re colour management. First, colour transformations are not required for sRGB images since all browsers assume sRGB by default. Second, while support for monitor ICC profiles would be nice, all browsers (not just Chrome) are equal in their lack of support for this. Arguably even that's not so much of an issue these days, except for wide gamut monitors. And finally, Google + is a web service not a browser.

I use Firefox as it's the only browser that supports image profiles and monitor profiles. My images look fine when viewed on Facebook or Skydrive. Not so good on Google+. They appear faded and lifeless. Makes Google+ a non-starter for me.

@Lucas. You are right there are absolutely points what will be need to make flikr GUI better. And what I believe, they hired some people to make it a better experience in the nearby future.

Being a paid member helps with a better user experience. What I do like of Flikr is that it is aimed at photography - it does not want to be Google+ nor Facebook. It has a broad photography user community.

Among all those, I still preffer Smumug for my gallery. It's very well structured database with excellent image quality. GUI is clean and simple, although with most needed options in easy to use drop-down menus. Maybe the fact that it's not free ( although very affordable IMO makes it less attractive ). 500px also impressed me well, so I'll look into it deeper. As for G+ IMO it certainly looks better than Flickr.

I think this is a big reason why Flickr failed, when I got to 200 photos I started dithering, shall I pay or not. And then other things turned up and I never got around to it. I’m a bit of a happy snapper, and will never be a great photographer, but I think the vast majority of flickr users are like me, and it’s a big step to start paying, 200 photos isn’t a big enough investment to force people to stay on flickr, so lots of people just left./Neil

I dont get how unknown photographers are supposed to interact...it seems us amateurs are merely allowed to look at all the big boys...unless I'm missing something...where do i get to see all the people like me's photo's and where do they get to see mine?

the only thing i use fb for is to post photos, and i hate the interfaces and quality of images on that site...that being said, they have the eyeballs (friends) so it's a bit of catch-22 for using g+...not much point to use it until the people are there, but hard to draw them there just to see pix. it's actually amazing to me how bad fb is regarding image sharing and display considering it has 1 billion members...they could do a lot better, not sure if they could do worse.

I wish I understood why people whine so much about Flickr. Flickr shows EXIF data too, and it's very easy to communicate with other photographers. I do it every day. I like G+ very much, and I wish more people used it. But I don't think it's some kind of Flickr killer.

While I also don't like the word "killer" I think that many premium flickr members went over to G+. I still use Flickr a little bit aswell but they haven't change enough in the past. Flickr group discussions are an outdated concept and make it hard to communicate since people have to dive into the groups before finding any discussions they might be interested in. Communication is on G+ much easier (in my opinion). Also the photo viewing experience. Why can't I see the exif info with one single click and blend them in instead of pushing me to another page? If I open the exif data I always have to go back afterwards. Same with the viewing sizes. There is so much unused space on the website - why I can't change the size with one click & why isn't it showing me the perfect size for the device I'm actually using. Yahoo was sleeping and didn't changed much on flickr since years. I really hope that something will change with Marissa.

This article reads like a advertisement for google-plus, The incredible size of the thumpnails - blabla - but not word about the terms of service on the first page, then on the second page a quote Getty ( a company which may buy images from google ) says the TOS would be OK and this way everything is ok.

Nonsense. Getty is not a group of photographers. Read the TOS, that is the key." you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works .... "

You're missing the sentences before and after. Notably: "You retain ownership of any intellectual property rights that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours." and "The rights you grant in this license are for the limited purpose of operating, promoting, and improving our Services, and to develop new ones. "

https://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/terms/

If they can't distributed the photos you post, the service doesn't work. They translate text of posts so others can read them. And I'm sure tons of other things to operate their services. Be paranoid if you like; for me it works fine.

"you retain ownership" only means that you still can copy your photos and also publish these somewhere else, that would go without saying.

But google could use it for any of its services in the future, poster print service ( who earns the money then ? do you get a share of it ? probably no ), picture services for internet advertising, postcard printing with your photos and customers text, .. they can call every business they do a service... Google will be domain registrar for tens of new generic Top Level Domains and perhaps will supply cloud storage, will the customers be able to use the photos in their websites ( because those are a google service )? If they do and you dont agree, you will need a good lawyer - google already has good lawyers.

If the service would be limited to "social network service" ( currently called googleplus ) .... but its not restricted.

In addition to that for the resizing of images google does not need the right to "create derivative works"

I agree the terms are "fishy" and I think it is sad that a company which also functions as a role model can not to produce a clear agreement. That being said, most people never intent to sell their pictures. To do so is hard work and time consuming. So for those of us never planning to sell their pictures google + seems to be a great place to share images regardless their license terms. Still I think for the sake of googles reputation ( and for being a better role model ) they should make the agreement more clear. Either admit they plan to profit from your images by reselling them if they can and what would be your royalty ( if any) or they should clearly state that the images are yours and only yours and that they do not want nor can financially benefit from them. If they would plan to sell my images and I would get a royalty it would be a clear bonus to me :-) But even if they did sell my image with me not seeing a penny, I am fine. I helped paying the service :-)

Here would be an example of clear terms:http://500px.com/termsLeft side legal speak, right side plain English. Lovely!

Please note that:1) All copyrights of your picture remain the way you chose. ( clear | fair | flexible )2) You can choose to sell your pictures through their service and a whopping 95 % of the sales price go into your pocket ( If I am not mistaken at getty you will get 25 % )3) At any given time they might shut down the service forvever. This seems a bit brisk in case you paid a year in advance for a pro service level.

After browsing their site for a while I will explore trying to sell pictures if it is as easy and straight forward as it looks :-) I sure enjoyed exploring pictures of others, my best exploring experience yet on any photo sharing site!